SO, according to my boomer mum, sending a child through uni these days is the same as it was in the 90s

[PotteringAboutIn]

Because apparently they didn't have the wages back then

Ffs
Drives me nuts

What when uni was free, accommodation wasn't anywhere near as expensive and you even got a grant

I mean, it kind of sounds like your mum is just unpleasant and unempathetic regardless of her generational label?

Latch key kid from 7 signing in.
Walked to and from school at 5 without an adult. We were out playing in the road without adults from very young.
My school finished at 4pm Two hour lunch hour. It changed later.
But I didn't go anywhere specific after school, though I may have gone to play with different friends nearby. (1970s)

I hear you. The anguish caused to my mum by having to work 2 hours a day cleaning a nice office/shop to make up the shortfall during the 15% period appears to have scarred for her for life.

Meanwhile I've been working two jobs for the last three years to pay my mortgage and help my daughter through uni...and unlike my parents I don't have the option of relocating somewhere cheaper because mum is 87 and we have no other family support should she need it.

I think as you say, it's a subject best avoided.

I got to use punched cards on the main frame at Uni in the 70s. On the basis of that I became the computer 'expert' in my first job in the 80s.

When I told my mum I was spending >£4,000 on nursery fees and it was crippling, she said ‘having children has always been expensive’.
She was a stay at home mum.
Cognitive dissonance

To be fair, I was a sahm in the 80s, but it cost me my salary so was ergo expensive. Nursery would have taken all my wages and more.

I'm a boomer so therefore thick, lazy, greedy, devoid of empathy, loaded with cash and rattling round my million pound mansion in between going on luxury cruises. Even I, wallowing in my selfish stupidity, know how very difficulty things are for parents and for young people are today because I interact with family members and friends of different ages and listen to their life experiences.

Funnily enough! My mum would have had it easier in terms of house prices, but her description of rationing, walking everywhere as only the local GP had a car, not to mention her dad fighting in the war for most of her early childhood, is not one I would swap for.

£4k a month net after tax, auto-enrolment and student loan requires a £75k a year salary.

I think that’s part of the cognitive dissonance - acknowledging quite what a huge sum of money that is compared to current wages. It’s not easily earned - you’d need a ‘top 10%’ salary to simply cover the cost of it with nothing left over,

It was never acceptable and not anything that I can recall and I was young in the 60's/70's. My mum worked (teacher) as did the mum's of my friends, this included a hairdresser, a cleaner, a shop assistant, and a book keeper. I seem to recall they worked part time when we were primary age so were home when we got in and then did more hours when we went to secondary school I never knew any SAHMs

I'm a boomer and went to uni in the early 80s. Full grant which easily paid for my accommodation and not too lavish lifestyle. Got a job after, own home by age 24. My adult (over 25) kids have come out of uni with £50000+ debt each, one out of 2 has found a f/t job (eventually and through and old contact) and neither can forsee being able to buy a home.
We had it easier.

My mum worked nights and my dad worked days all through our childhood, they didn't own a house they couldn't afford to buy. Life was much harder, no car everything had to be carried, bus and long walk from the nearest town. No dishwasher, no washing machine for a long time, freezers didn't really exist, we didn't have a fridge for years. Not everyone was wealthy as your parents seem to have been. Us going to Uni was a real struggle we didn't get grants because our parents rented and that didn't count towards the means test, only mortgage payments did.

It’s baby boomer though not boomer. Boomer is pejorative.

UK Industry was in decline in the 70s before Thatcher. More mines were closed before her than during her years in office. Continuing to prop up antiquated working practices with expensive labour was never sustainable when literally everything could be made cheaper abroad. Yes, mistakes were made as we should have been providing a lot more support for the affected areas, created new employment opportunities etc., but Labour didn't address that either in their 13 years in power. Thatcher's answer was turning a blind eye to fraudulent disability benefit claims. Blair's answer was throwing all resources at Unis. Add into that refusing to prioritise UK workers when doing national infrastructure projects, defence spending etc which both parties are guilty of by blaming the EU when other EU countries "got away with" prioritising their own country's industries! It's been an almighty mess for 50-60 years as no politicians have properly dealt with the shift of manufacturing from West to East.

No, she is right. It cost her a career and a salary. Mind, a) nursery places should be state run not private businesses (because there is always the profit motive which can over-ride safeguarding), b) cheaper and if subsidised then subsidy goes to all mothers to spend as they wish, including themselves staying at home or having family arrangements.

You are making an assumption here that the only reason she would have been a SAHM was because of childcare costs / she had to give up a career as a result. Which isn’t the case.

The issue of women expecting to not work after marriage / it being more normalised to stop work is a feature of the era (and one that often left women worse off financially for a variety of reasons in the longer term) - but, that isn’t really an equivalency to the 2026 issue of extremely high childcare costs.

This again feeds back to the ‘I think i had it harder so I’m not interested in the current challenges of today’ mentality which many posters are expressing frustration with.

I'm a boomer (just) and I have a dd currently at uni, so am very aware of the difference between now and then (I went to uni on a full grant).

Generally I dislike the use of boomer to indicate narrow-minded, self-satisfied oldies who dont know and dont care. My mum and my gran are both still alive, and very socially aware. Having said which, every generation is prone to favouring their own perspective.

Truth is, some things were cheaper then and some more expensive. Overall, wages have failed to keep pace with inflation for 20 years and that is affecting all but the rich. For me, the real story is growing inequality and the 'villains' are not the old but the very rich. Remember that boomers include other social groups who were sacrificed to capitalism, like working women, the miners, manufacturing workers.

But right now young people are facing a constellation of factors which make them capitalism's victims (other than those who will inherit from wealthy parents, who are also neglected in this debate). I worry about my kids finding jobs, and I remember what it was like finding work in the mass unemployment of the 80s.

When the nippers take to the barricades, Ill be there with them.

70-year old Boomer here, and I can't imagine any of my contemporaries or older friends thinking this way!

One pair of friends, a fair few years older than me, paid off their daughter's student loan as a wedding present. It increased their borrowing potential and enabled them to buy their first home.

They've also invested a large-ish chunk of their own inheritance in some high-growth fund that they hope might mean that their grandchild can fund his own degree when the time comes.

I think it's appalling that higher education is no longer free, especially as so many professional occupations are now only open to graduates and there's no option to train while working. I have friends who qualified as solicitors, civil engineers and accountants via that route, and nurses only needed 5 O-levels to start training.

Living expenses at Uni in 90s was funded by parents and yp working unless yp was from a low income household and got a grant.
My catered accommodation (band D - so not fanciest but not shared room - we shared a communal bathroom) was £58 a week. My wage that summer for full time factory work was £128 a week (I’ve kept my building society book I paid my cheques in)

Differences were
Accommodation was term time only so only paying around 30 weeks - you used to vacate room in holidays and they used it for conferences etc
Accommodation costs much higher
Grants were based on parent only - my husband got one on basis his mum had no income and was divorced from his dad even though she was remarried and living with full time working step dad. Now loan system would be based on household income.

We support our dd who only gets min English loan. Without our support she couldn’t afford to go. My dad supported me in 90s and without his support I couldn’t have afforded to go.

In early 90s if you didn’t get a grant you got no financial help (no loans)
Now even if parents won’t assist you can borrow at least £5000 a year in England.

I also walked home from school 1.5 miles and let myself in from age 8 (my mum was a teacher so not hours on my own) I asked as I hated the neighbours spoiled daughter - previous arrangement had been to walk home with neighbour who was a sahm.

They're not derogatory.
The phrase "Ok Boomer" is, but boomer itself is not and neither is millennial or Gen X or Silent Generation.

"I have friends who qualified as solicitors, civil engineers and accountants via that route, and nurses only needed 5 O-levels to start training."

Yes, I know someone who worked as a solicitor after doing 'articles' and no degree. I don't know if there are any still practising with that background though.
Nursing was something you could start at 17 when I was younger. We had a future trainee nurse in sixth form, but she was only there to use the time till she was old enough because she didn't need A levels, let alone a degree.

When you are a mature student you have a somewhat different uni experience than the younger crowd. There is an element of making up for lost time and getting a qualification you should have got years ago. Having a jolly time is very much secondary. The uni put on a week long course for mature undergraduates which I attended before term began. It was a revelation. I remember looking at a "!st class" essay and thinking that I can write to that standard. I had come from a profession where young graduates were coming in and being promoted over our heads because they had a bit of paper we didn't have. When I complained I was told I was jealous because these graduates were smarter than I was. Most of them had a 2/2. I realised in that week that they were not smarter. They just had richer mummies and daddies who had handed them life on a plate.

It may have been free but hardly anyone went. I had friends who were extremely clever, excellent exam results. They did not go to uni, they became secretaries.

I went to uni in 1992-95 I had to wait until then because my dads income was too high for me to qualify for a grant and if I waited til I was 26 I could be self supporting.

When I started they were just introducing 'top up loans' - so a shift was happening as many more polytechnics had become universities to allow more people to travel away to study for degrees rather than live at home and attend a local technical college or polytechnic.

This meant a huge increase in people wanting grants as I belive, but am happy to be corrected that you would have had your fees paid but not a maintanance grant, although I was aware of other in education fundings, usually from your local cvouncil. So the switch over from a full grant to the introduction of the first version of the student loans company was born, and was gradually to a full maintanance loan. No Uni fees were payable by a student at that point, and there was no interest charged on the loans which were just index linked.

I went to the University of Westminster, and they did have halls of residence - pretty much all first years went into halls, then some were able to stay in them for the subsequent years, but most people got shared houses with friends from halls or their course.

Student houses as a 'all bills included / council tax exempt/ set up as a business model' did not exist that I was aware of. Renting was mainly getting a house rental on the open market - lots of daily searching through Loot, and hoping to secure something. Tenancies were often 6 months or a year, and it was not uncommon for us to move on after each term. Rents were around £45-60 a week per person and we were usually in zone 2 for that, in a house with maybe 6 of us, and surrendering the lounge. Sometimes furnished, sometimes unfurnished or part furnished. Think a cross betweeen Spaced and The Young Ones....

Most of us worked part time too - and this was where things are also different, because part time shop and bar work was pretty plentiful and flexible. Part time work allowed us to live a bit and have fun - it wasnt expected that we would NEED to work and that contact hours would need to account for that. We had pretty much full uni days - probably 24 hours full taught lectures a week as well as extra open studios and computer labs. That said we worked on Mac classics and Photoshop had only just come out (and I was in a specific digital imaging degree)

All in all I suspect the heyday was the decade prior to the 90s,(you used to be able to sign on in the summer holidays at that point!) but we had it pretty good compared to today's students (my son has just finished his first year)

Have you considered the possibility that it's not fine to say it if it upsets people of that age group? You may never have meant it to be an insult, but a lot of people do use it as one, as in 'Ok, Boomer.'

Can I ask how you know that she didn't have things hard? Wouldn't you be upset if she told you that you only think you're having it hard?